New biography reveals Hemingway’s complexity
Ernest Hemingway fatally shot himself on July 2, 1961, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. In the decades that have followed, countless scholars and writers have tried to capture the life of the influential Lost Generation author. Mary Dearborn contends there is still more to his story.
“He was tremendously vulnerable, even as a young man,” says the biographer, “and we don’t get that at all.”
Dearborn, the author of “Ernest Hemingway: A Biography,” is the first woman to write a full account of the life of the writer nicknamed Papa.
The Massachusetts native will discuss and sign her work 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Winter Park Library, 460 E. New England Ave. (A ticketed meet-andgreet will be held 6-6:30 p.m. Proceeds will benefit local publisher Burrow Press. Admission is $50. Details: writersblockbookstore.com)
Typically, Hemingway is portrayed as “a monolithic he-man,” says Dearborn, 60. “I think that every generation needs its own Hemingway biography, but they’ve all been the same,” she says. “You get the same anecdotes. It’s the same hypermale, macho legend.”
As a woman, “I don’t have any investment in that legend,” Dearborn says. “It’s not that I want to debunk that view, but there’s so much more going on.”
Dearborn began reading Hemingway in her adolescence and studied him in college and graduate school. A biographer whose previous subjects have included Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Peggy Guggenheim, she says of Hemingway, “My empathy for him and my passionate feeling about him was greater than my other biographies.”
Dearborn’s work is the first to make use of documents that have only recently come to light. She had access to records of Hemingway from Cuba, including medical reports that she says show “he was really falling apart for the last two or three decades of his life.” While fans are familiar with the author’s famous struggles with alcohol, Dearborn says there were many more factors, such as prescription drugs and an ignorance of mental illness at the time. “I’m not saying no one tried to get him help, but there wasn’t much help to be had,” she says.
“Ernest Hemingway” is also the first complete memoir since revelations about the author’s youngest child, born Gregory, being transgender, a fact which Dearborn claims Hemingway knew since the child was 13.
Hemingway’s later works reflected a desire to understand his child’s mindset, Dearborn says. “These concerns seem really contemporary now,” she says. “I think he’d be really interested in the dialogue going on about gender if only for his son’s sake.”
The cover of the new biography shows Hemingway aiming a gun at the camera. Dearborn says the author used guns his whole life. “That’s a picture that manages to be a graph,” she says. “He lived by the gun. He died by the gun.”